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Abstract:
The intriguing idea that strongly interacting electrons can generate
spatially inhomogeneous electronic liquid-crystalline phases is over a
decade old(1-5), but these systems still represent an unexplored
frontier of condensed-matter physics. One reason is that visualization
of the many-body quantum states generated by the strong interactions,
and of the resulting electronic phases, has not been achieved. Soft
condensed-matter physics was transformed by microscopies that enabled
imaging of real-space structures and patterns. A candidate technique for
obtaining equivalent data in the purely electronic systems is
spectroscopic imaging scanning tunnelling microscopy (SI-STM). The core
challenge is to detect the tenuous but 'heavy' momentum (k)-space
components of the many-body electronic state simultaneously with its
real-space constituents. Sr3Ru2O7 provides a particularly exciting
opportunity to address these issues. It possesses a very strongly
renormalized 'heavy' d-electron Fermi liquid(6,7) and exhibits a
field-induced transition to an electronic liquid-crystalline phase(8,9).
Finally, as a layered compound, it can be cleaved to present an
excellent surface for SI-STM.
